Practice Areas

King County Business Law is the law practice of Attorney Thomas H. White.

Tom is admitted to practice in Seattle and New York. (Washington State and New York State).

Business Law

Tom has worked on a wide variety of Business Law matters and can help keep your legal ducks in a row. When you are just starting a business you need Entity Formation and advice that helps you protect your personal assets from unhappy customers. If you have employees, you need to protect yourself from employee misclassification and other compliance problems that plague new businesses. You also need Independent Contractor and Employment Contracts drafted that fit the law of the state of Washington.

If you generate ideas in your business or you intend to have a meaningful marketing strategy, it’s important that you have Trade Secret, Trademark, and Copyright Protection. If you have independent sales agents working for you, you need to make sure your Sales Representative Contracts satisfy the Independent Sales Representative Acts of fifty states.

If you have a business web site, you need privacy policies, Terms of Service, User Agreements, and Copyrights.

And if you are putting together a Startup rather than a conventional business and anticipate raising money, you need to ensure that everything from corporate formation to IP Assignment to investment and board member decisions will pass due diligence review from sophisticated investors.

Estate Planning

Estate Planning is a great are of law to work in because it lets you help clients make their lives and their families lives easier. While everyone needs a will and powers of attorney, every family is different and almost everyone has some specific need or wrinkle because of an unusual family, a particular property, or the desire to go the extra mile in terms of setting their kids up in case of an accident.

Without that planning, the the wrong person be named as a child’s guardian, the wrong beneficiary designation can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal taxes, and even the wrong form of title in your real estate can keep your partner from being able to keep your shared home.

Trademark Law

Attorney Thomas White helps businesses with their Trademark needs because he enjoys helping them protect the brands they work so hard to build. He has seen well-regarded IP firms get marks approved that would never survive a court battle and he wants clients to be better served.

Even when he has to tell people they are better not to apply for a certain mark, Tom likes to be able to save them time they otherwise would have wasted applying for the wrong mark or building a brand that they cannot protect.

Litigation

Tom has worked on numerous real estate and complex business litigation matters and can help take your dispute to court. Most business disputes begin as understandable disagreements. When the other side gets unreasonable, those disagreements turn into litigation. Litigation ultimately is about explaining to a judge (and sometimes a jury) why your client happens to be right. It is a long and expensive process involving a careful review of the facts, extensive analysis of paper evidence and of interviews (called “depositions”), carefully constructed legal arguments, and ultimately trust that your position is correct and that the Court will agree with you.

Tom has worked on litigation and threatened litigation concerning, for example,

Personal and Other Matters

Loans

If you are interested in making a large personal loan, Tom can help you with your legal documents and help counsel you as to your legal obligations. He can also assist with bringing or defending legal actions against a creditor or debtor.

Harassment

If you are having trouble with a person who is harassing you, Tom can help you file for an anti-harassment protection order in Seattle.

Appeals

Tom enjoys appeals and is happy to put them together or to assist. He has studied appeals and argument under numerous members of the Supreme Court Bar. While winning the National Telecommunications Moot Court Competition he briefed the telecommunications bar about important constitutional and national security issues around government-imposed communications blackouts. He has also helped to demonstrate and teach hundreds of law students at a top law school how to do oral arguments. If you want help narrowing issues for appeal, mooting a case, or you want different counsel for your matter on appeal, Tom can help.